I have wanted to be a doctor for as long as I can remember. I played hospital with my dolls as a child. I never thought of alternative career paths. I climbed the long, sometimes unbearably steep mountain to reach the top.
I loved clinic medicine for many years. Most days, I still do. Until recently, I had never considered leaving, choosing a different path.
Then, I walked into the clinic and …
A patient, let’s call him Jay, came to me refusing a leg amputation. He had open sores that were necrotic, foul-smelling as if he had been neglected for a long time. At his consultation, he fought with every cell of his being, refusing to lose his leg as his uncle did. He wanted a second opinion on whether or not his foot could be saved.
Traditional insurance-based medicine has …
From an early age, I shared the soccer field with my younger brother, and later, we shared an orthopedic surgeon when I tore my ACL. I worked hard and excelled at my public STEM high school in New York City. I was also an athletic trainer in high school and college. I fit the classic stereotype of the injured sporty kid going into orthopedic surgery, right?
Not exactly.
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“We are in an epidemic of gaslighting in medicine. The best definition I heard of gaslighting is transferring your authority on yourself from you to someone else. We give up our authority on ourselves to everyone else but ourselves. We leave our feelings …
Change is a mysterious creature. It can be both welcome and unwelcome at the same time. It can make us grow in ways we’ve never imagined and yet bring us to our knees. Ironically, it is one of the few things we are promised.
Learning how to navigate change with some grace has been one of the silver linings of living during a pandemic. We were quickly reminded of how little …
As doctors, we have all been guilty of anchoring bias, which means we put too much weight on the first complaint. When a patient presents to the clinic with a complaint that sounds vaguely like a headache due to a sinus infection, we whip out the script pad and write a script for Augmentin. We tell them to return if they are not better in two days. That latter statement …
“If your shoulder were really injured, that maneuver would make you scream in pain,” he told me confidently.
My husband and I recently established care with a new family doctor. I was frightened and scarred from a long history of medical gaslighting that still tightens my throat whenever I meet a new physician.
Will this doctor believe me? Will he understand?
Years of dismissal made me wary of a new start, but we …
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“I never thought social media hacking would offer such important reminders and lessons, but here we are.
By the way, I am the first to admit that it’s easy to gloss over phrases and lessons because you’ve heard them a million times before, and …
By the end of April 2022, nearly 40 percent of the country’s baby formula ran out of stock, leading to a major baby formula shortage in the United States. The plummeting availability of baby formula has left parents and caregivers anxious as they struggle to feed their infants, since roughly 75 percent of babies in the U.S. receive at least some formula …
On June 1, two doctors, a medical receptionist, and a patient were gunned down in the doctors’ outpatient office in Tulsa, Oklahoma. An investigation revealed that one of the doctors was the intended target — a patient, angry because his pain was not relieved after spinal surgery, decided that the doctor who performed the surgery deserved to die. The other victims were collateral damage.
This event is shocking. It’s frightening that …
Physicians have terrible technology, but they refuse to recognize high-tech as a medical specialty. They must integrate technology as they do laboratory science.
Physicians are certainly suffering from poorly-designed electronic medical records (EHR), but they are also guilty of wilful blindness in abdicating responsibility for technology in medicine. This must change.
Physicians have a higher suicide rate than post-combat troops in the military. A lot of this is due …
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“My wife is a urogynecologist lucky enough to get through her seven years of residency plus fellowship with “only” $124,000 of student debt. When we discussed how we were going to get rid of this debt, she had always assumed that it was …
An excerpt from Pluck: Lessons We Learned for Improving Healthcare and the World, published by Silicon Valley Press.
We met Joseph S. Murtaugh, our new chief at the National Institutes of Health, for the first time on July 3, 1967. He sat behind his desk, looking every bit like …
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KevinMD contributors, virtually without exception, have asserted the solution to events like the horrific tragedy in Uvalde, Texas, is “gun control.” Allow me to present an alternative viewpoint in the interest of diversity of opinion.
First of all, I favor reasonable gun restriction laws. But sadly, I don’t think that will solve the problem. Look at the city of Chicago. It has one of the strictest laws on gun control in …
In the wake of medical home certification, meaningful use, the Cures Act, and the pandemic, it’s clear that virtually all health care is now built on a digital foundation. EHRs are pervasive in the delivery system and are increasingly connected to practice management software, virtual visit, mobile capabilities, health information exchanges, and population health platforms. As we consider the criticality of interoperability throughout this evolving digital ecosystem, I’m moved to …
“For many health care professionals, the stresses of their roles routinely take a heavy toll on their mental and physical well-being. It did for me. The pandemic and the unprecedented loss of life were more overwhelming than any of us could have imagined, and for some, it simply pushed them over …
When most health care professionals hear the word “malpractice,” they want to run the other way. This is understandable—but also a missed opportunity. We can leverage malpractice data to target and drive investment in patient safety efforts. Malpractice data shows us that good communication and teamwork are vital to preventing adverse events and malpractice claims—while dramatically improving working conditions and enhancing patient safety.
Malpractice data shows that communication-related factors contribute to …
A friend called me for medical advice two weeks ago. He’s single, in his 30s and generally healthy, but he’d developed a dry cough with mild congestion. After a self-administered COVID-19 test turned up negative results, he remained suspicious he could be infected.
He was set to fly west in a couple of days for a conference and dreaded the thought of infecting other passengers. I recommended a PCR test if …
Mental health disorders are by far the largest cause of disability in the world. More money is spent on mental health than either diabetes or cardiovascular disease. About 45 million people in the U.S. have a mental illness. Almost every American will, at some point or another, face a mental health challenge. It may be related to depression, anxiety, suicidal thoughts, substance abuse or maybe something more circumstantial like grief …
“Teaching medical students entrepreneurial and business skills is invaluable as the need for leadership in medicine grows in every single sector. Many physicians already engage in managerial and entrepreneurial-like practices without labeling these skills. By formalizing these skills into medical education, physicians will be able to take their ambitions and ideas …
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